The dark heart of Israel's regional military policy

When you believe your enemies hate you more than they love their children, as Golda Meir put it, there’s no real deterrence against them; you have to keep bombing.

Israeli Air Force F-15 takes off (photo: IDF Spokesperson

Most people in the West, I’d say, think that if Israel gives up the occupation, it will be healed. It will no longer be a danger to others and itself. Unfortunately, that’s not the case, and additional proof of this came Monday night when Israeli jet bombers again struck Hezbollah in Lebanon. The attack was another reminder that even if Israel were to get out of the West Bank and adopt a hands-off policy toward Gaza, it still believes it has the right to bomb neighboring countries to retard their military development, all the while Israel itself, of course, goes on building its arsenal to the heavens.

That won’t change if Israel signs a peace treaty with the Palestinians. Hezbollah will still be arming itself across the border, Muslim countries will sooner or later try to build nuclear weapons. And Israel won’t tolerate that; Israel will keep sending out the jet bombers (unless, as in the case with Iran, America puts its foot down).

Israel’s regional military policy – bombing Iraq’s embryonic nuclear reactor (which marked not the end of Saddam’s nuclear program, but really its beginning), bombing Syria’s embryonic nuclear reactor, killing Iranian nuclear scientists, killing Hezbollah’s military chief, bombing Hamas-bound arms convoys in Sudan, and, the latest obsession, bombing Hezbollah-bound arms convoys along the Lebanese-Syrian border – is more dangerous, at least in the short term, than the occupation. Any of these attacks could start a war, and eventually one of them is likely to do just that, unless you believe that Israel can go on hitting its neighbors indefinitely without them ever hitting back. (Since the 2006 war in Lebanon, the blowback has been limited to a Hezbollah terror attack that killed five Israelis on a tourist bus in Burgas, Bulgaria, and an Iranian attack on the Israeli embassy in New Delhi that injured the wife of a diplomat.)

Another way in which Israel’s regional military policy is a worse problem than the occupation is the complete acceptance of it by the country’s Jewish majority, and the apathy toward it from the Western world. That these attacks are acts of military aggression by a regional superpower using bombs to maintain its “qualitative edge” doesn’t seem to matter to anyone; Hezbollah is bad, Iran is bad, Syria is bad, they’re all bad, and Israel is good, or at least relatively good, so anything goes. (As long as it doesn’t backfire.) These enemies are “pledged to Israel’s destruction,” they’re “militant Islamists,” so Israel can attack them to its heart’s content. They don’t have to fire any missiles at Israel, they just have to possess those missiles (which are a pittance compared to Israel’s), and any Israeli bombing run on their territory automatically becomes “self-defense.”

It goes without saying that if any of the neighbors bombed Israel’s advanced weapons or killed its nuclear scientists or even tried to fly a spy plane through its airspace, which Israel does about every other day in Lebanon, it would be treated as an act of war, an attempt to destroy this country.

You would think that a nation which is so much stronger than its enemies, which attacks them time after time without getting hit back, would one day say: “What do you know – they’re afraid of me. That means I don’t have to attack them – I just have to sit on my military superiority and I’ll be safe. There’s a name for this, isn’t there? Oh yeah – deterrence.” Israel’s deterrence, as seen again in Monday night’s lethal, unanswered attack on Hezbollah, is absolutely incredible. Hezbollah, Syria, Iran – as much as they loathe Israel, as much as they’d love to attack it, not only don’t they attack, they very rarely lift a finger when Israel attacks them! Yet this country goes on doing it because it believes that if these enemies ever get even a fraction of the sophisticated weaponry Israel has, they will go for the kill.

The problem with this theory is it assumes that Iraq, Syria, Iran and Hezbollah (not to mention the Palestinians, who have been under attack 24/7 for nearly half a century) are willing to destroy themselves for the sake of destroying this country. Because no matter how strong they get, they will never be able to carry out a crushing, life-threatening attack on Israel, even with nuclear weapons, without ending up in smoking ruins themselves.

But Israeli policy is based on the assumption that its enemies are willing – no, eager – to pay that price. They are willing to die en masse for the privilege of annihilating the Jewish state. And there’s no deterrence against that, there’s only, as Prime Minister Netanyahu likes to call it, “vigilance.”

Yet what does this assumption say about Israel’s view of its enemies? That they’re not exactly human. They’re willing to sacrifice their entire country, their entire society, for the sake of destroying this one. What human society has ever been willing to do that? What species of animal has ever been homicidal to the point of collective suicide? Yet this is what Israel believes about its enemies, which is why it can’t stop bombing them. We’re up against a “culture of death.” As Golda Meir said, in one of the most beloved aphorisms of Zionist history, “Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.”

This is what we believe: that the Arabs hate us more than they love their children.

There is a term for an attitude such as ours: “dehumanization.”

It is dehumanization of Arabs, of Muslims, that causes Israel to go on bombing its enemies even when those enemies don’t retaliate, even when they are incomparably weaker than Israel, even when it’s self-evident to Israel that those enemies know how weak they are and how strong Israel is. We bomb them because we know that if they ever stop being weak, they will kill us, even though they know we will kill them, too, because they don’t care. They hate us more than they love their own children.

They’re not human. There’s no deterrence against them. Only vigilance.

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COMMENTS

richard witty

FridayFebruary 28, 2014

Terror is real.

It is an error,a willingness for the future victims of terror to occur.

That there are literally thousands of suicide bombing attacks by many factions on many factions describe the willingness of suicide bombers TO in fact do what you dismiss, risk the lives of their families, community, nation, to actively hate, is more than incidental.

“I don’t know” is a more realistic conclusion.

Reply to Comment

bob wisby

FridayFebruary 28, 2014

Richard, you point out that ‘Terror is real’. Strong stuff, Richard, and I’d agree. Tanks and planes firing 500lb missiles into your street might be just as (if not more) terrifying than a lone suicide bomber, no? Or is ‘Terror’ a sensation only experienced by Israelis?

Reply to Comment

bob wisby

FridayFebruary 28, 2014

Thank you, Larry.
“What species of animal has ever been homicidal to the point of collective suicide? Yet this is what Israel believes about its enemies, which is why it can’t stop bombing them.”

And why do Israelis (and Jews abroad) believe this stuff? Who’s been teaching them to view non-Jews in this inhuman way? Can they be helped? How?

It’s going to take pressure on Israel to end the occupation and sign the Arab Peace Initiative, which would require Israel to refrain to bombing its neighbors. That’s how I think things can change, not by education or therapy or something like that. Europe and Japan changed because they learned the cost of their craziness. Unfortunately, there’s a strong chance Israel may learn it the hard way, too, and I don’t know if it will survive such a lesson. I’d prefer it being pressured into doing the right thing for lack of choice, which I think is also a possibility, and the one we’re working for.

Reply to Comment

bob wisby

FridayFebruary 28, 2014

“Europe and Japan changed because they learned the cost of their craziness”

Two atomic bombs and the leveling of their major cities.

I agree, Israel might not be able to survive that. But will they ever listen to anything else? History doesn’t offer many examples of craziness that was halted by negotiations, does it?

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Danny

FridayFebruary 28, 2014

Israel can behave this way because it can. It has F15′s and F16′s, and its enemies don’t. It’s that simple.

If Hezbollah had a fleet of fighter-bombers at its disposal, or advanced anti-aircraft defenses, do you think for an instant that Israel would dare do this sort of crap?

My best guess is that after Assad defeats the insurgency in Syria, Hezbollah will have the resources to extract payment from Israel for all this crap, and we’ll see another round of Lebanon v. Israel.

Until then, I expect Hezbollah to try to hit Israeli soft targets overseas. It’s a relatively safe tactic in that Israel cannot directly point its finger at Hezbollah yet knows full well who did it and why.

It is said in Israel that the Arabs understand only the language of force. This classic projection by Israel because it is Israel that seems to only speak the language of force, not the Arabs.

It is even true that abused children can abuse their parents even as their parents are abusing them as, say, when adult children are parental caregivers, all sorts of psychological missiles in the air.

But groups are not individuals. Some within a locale will want a way out, just as one sibling in the above situation might seek a change. That is where hope resides.

bob wisby

So Israel has given itself permnission to attack any and all neighbor states, to kill any people in those states and at home, freely, without provocation and without serious threat. If the Israeli military think of Arabs as sub-human, perhaps they think of themselves as ubermenschen, people to whom all is possible, people for whom there are no rules.

Sounds like the mental-set in Germany, 1933-1945. And sounds like certian theories about victims of abuse adopting the abusive behavior of their own abusers.

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bob wisby

FridayFebruary 28, 2014

That’s what I thought, too, Pabelmont. The important question, I think, and the one I’ve asked for Larry’s clarification on above, is where on earth they’ve been educated into this mind-set, and what can people do to help them to escape from it.

Reply to Comment

Danny

FridayFebruary 28, 2014

Israel likes to play a double game of “we hit our enemies at will and in their own back yards” and “woe to the Arab that dares attacks us, even in retaliation for our initial attack”. It’s a game that it is able to play because Hezbollah is stretched thin at the moment while fighting in Syria.

I would expect an indirect retaliation at some point – maybe a Burgas-like attack against soft Israeli targets.

Reply to Comment

bob wisby

FridayFebruary 28, 2014

“I would expect an indirect retaliation at some point – maybe a Burgas-like attack against soft Israeli targets”

Yes, I would say that’s about right, Danny. And I’m sure the relevant parties are working on something like this as we speak. Got to re-galvanize the Israeli public somehow.

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Bar

FridayFebruary 28, 2014

More amazing insights from Mr. Derfner.

I am curious, though, about a couple of small details that weren’t mentioned in this article. For example, what can we learn about Hamas and its thousands of rockets into Israel. Are they dehumanizing Israelis? If so, how should the Israelis respond? Should they seek to deter the dehumanizing rocket-shooters, try to blow them up into smithereens or should they humanize them by inviting them over for some hummus and olives?

Likewise with Hizbullah. Do you recall, Mr. Derfner, several years ago when Hizbullah dehumanized Israelis by launching a false attack and then using the real attack to kill some soldiers and kidnap two others (whom they also killed, albeit not without first extracting the release of multiple prisoners including one who dehumanized an Israeli girl by murdering her after making her watch her father die). Should Israel have invited these guys to lunch as well?

Or perhaps, might it be wiser for Israel to prevent these murderers from acquiring the tools they need to cause future harm to Israel? I mean, it’s not as if they think they can go toe to toe with the “regional superpower,” right? So what are they stocking up for? To impress some reporters?

It’s okay to despise the political system in your country, Mr. Derfner, but let’s not be ridiculous.

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bob wisby

FridayFebruary 28, 2014

“For example, what can we learn about Hamas and its thousands of rockets into Israel. Are they dehumanizing Israelis?”

No, Bar. But these bottle-rocket attacks are certainly very, very serious. I hear one of them broke a window in someone’s green-house recently. Thank God they all seem to land in open ground, with no damage or injury reported.

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Bar

FridayFebruary 28, 2014

Yes, such tiny, harmless rockets that Israel built an entirely new school complex with shielding from rockets in Sderot.

Are you listening to yourself? Thousands of rockets launched at civilian centers are something you dismiss as normal. Now compare this to Israeli bombing a Hizbullah convoy of sophisticated rockets. Who is dehumanizing whom?

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Ginger Eis

SaturdayMarch 1, 2014

We love you, Bar. Excellent rebuttal! That ‘thing’ you are responding to has “issues”. I leave it up to your good judgment as to when and how you deal with ‘it’ (e.g. when ‘its’ response is responsive and substantive). I would add to your comment that the life of every (school) child is as precious as the life of the Israeli Prime Minister him-/herself! Israel will invest any amount to save the lives of her citizens. That’s “Article 1(1) Of The Social Contract” every Israeli signed with the Jewish State. Israel will not wait for one or two Israeli civilians to be killed in her streets or in their homes, etc., before acting to stop the killing. Israel will act timely to prevent the killing from taking place – regardless of what the ilk of Larry Derfner thinks.

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bob wisby

SaturdayMarch 1, 2014

“That ‘thing’ you are responding to has “issues”.”

There you go, Ginger; a fine example of the dehumanization of others discussed in Larry’s article. Thank you.

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Ginger Eis

FridayFebruary 28, 2014

According to the Larry Derfner, it is a fabrication that Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, PFLP, etc. and their godfathers: Iran and Syria are NOT “willing to sacrifice their entire country, their entire society, for the sake of destroying this one”, i.e. Israel. Larry Derfner goes on to ask the following rhetorical question: (a) “What human society has ever been willing to do that?” (b) What species of animal has ever been homicidal to the point of collective suicide?” Surely we need no Larry Derfners to answer these questions. The Officers and Soldiers Of Allah can surely speak for themselves. So then, let’s hear them speak from their own mouths. Here are parts 1 and 2 (lets see if censure will allow the links) :http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sY58jUSAOVI (Part 1)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QLGpOkXl1U (Part 2)

It made me think about the 4 systems Israel has been developing to protect itself from missile and mortar attacks over the past several years, such as Iron Dome.

Why would Israel be so busy developing these defensive systems? Are they unconvinced by your proposition that “…a nation which is so much stronger than its enemies, which attacks them time after time without getting hit back, would one day say: ‘What do you know – they’re afraid of me. That means I don’t have to attack them – I just have to sit on my military superiority and I’ll be safe. There’s a name for this, isn’t there? Oh yeah – deterrence’?”

Don’t these defensive missile systems suggest that Israel is far from comfortable about its deterrence, especially long term? And furthermore, how do you gain deterrence capabilities without attacking the enemy and making them pay a price every once in a while? Any suggestions?

Reply to Comment

bob wisby

FridayFebruary 28, 2014

“Why would Israel be so busy developing these defensive systems?”

Because they can sell them, Bar. They’re quite expensive, I gather.

Reply to Comment

Bar

FridayFebruary 28, 2014

Military requisitions don’t work that way.

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bob wisby

FridayFebruary 28, 2014

“Military requisitions don’t work that way.”

Of course they don’t. And in Israel, it’s impossible to get round regulations. They’re sticklers for the formal protocols of business.

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Bar

SaturdayMarch 1, 2014

Nonsensical response.

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bob wisby

SaturdayMarch 1, 2014

At least you didn’t use foul language, Bar. Probably on account of you being a lady.

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Yair

FridayFebruary 28, 2014

Ami Ayalon, a peace campaigner and member of the Knesset, was asked if he stood by his oft-quoted remark that the Palestinians and the Israelis hate each other. “I cannot say that I hate Palestinians, but I think, as a nation, as a society, yes, most Israelis hate Palestinians and most Palestinians hate Israelis… I had a very interesting meeting in London during the intifada. A Palestinian friend approached me [and said]: ‘Ami, we won. We Palestinians won.’… I asked him, ‘Are you crazy? What do you mean “We won”? You are losing so many people… and we are losing so many people. What is the whole essence of victory?’ He said, ‘Ami you don’t understand us. Victory for us is to see you suffer”

When you consider the fact that our enemies in 2000 rejected making peace with us, and then used a flimsy pretext with which to launch a senseless terror campaign that resulted in 3-4 times as many Palestinian deaths as Israeli ones, then can you really logically make the argument that our real enemies, not all the Arabs, but the ones who truly detest us,like the leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad,and Hezbollah, love their children more than they hate us?

Hate is an incredibly human emotion, but also an incredibly irrational one. It is entirely possible for a human being’s malice to both poison how they view their enemies and distort how they treat the people they love. In my opinion, that is what dehumanization really is.

Since June 2012 the US has been told to take a hike by Egypt,Turkey,Syria,Lebanon,Iran and Israel.

The real war is invisible,the visible war is an illusion.

Reply to Comment

Ginger Eis

FridayFebruary 28, 2014

According to the Larry Derfner, it is a fabrication that Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, PFLP, etc. and their godfathers: Iran and Syria are NOT “willing to sacrifice their entire country, their entire society, for the sake of destroying this one”, i.e. Israel. Larry Derfner goes on to ask the following rhetorical question: (a) “What human society has ever been willing to do that?” (b) What species of animal has ever been homicidal to the point of collective suicide?” Surely we need no Larry Derfners to answer these questions. The Officers and Soldiers Of Allah can surely speak for themselves. So then, let’s hear them speak from their own mouths. Here is part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sY58jUSAOVI

(there are 4-parts of this video which I have unsuccessfully tried to link. If, and that’s a big if, Mr. Derfner decides to allow this one through, you guys can search for the rest on youtube).

Reply to Comment

bob wisby

FridayFebruary 28, 2014

Ginger, I’m sure you would be very upset if somebody alleged that in Israel, everyone goes around waving live chickens over their heads or sucking blood from newly mutilated baby penises or dropping bombs on hospitals or forcibly sterilizing immigrant women or discriminating against non-Jews or raping their own daughters etc etc…You would be right to object, because Israel isn’t all about doing these things. They’re only a small part of life here. Many of us spend our whole lives here without sucking even one bleeding baby penis or playing lasso with a live chicken. Similarly, Ginger, you can’t extrapolate from the ravings of any group of fanatics in uniform that this means all of the members of those Arab societies are willing to die in order to kill Jews. Surely you can see the sense of that.

Reply to Comment

bob wisby

FridayFebruary 28, 2014

“Israel built an entirely new school complex with shielding from rockets in Sderot.”

Why only in Sderot, Bar? Isn’t Israel as a whole under daily existential threat from the fireworks? Why aren’t the kids in Kfar Saba or Tel Aviv protected? Will there be evacuations, do you think? Is the airport safe?

bob wisby

I grew up during the cold war when deterrence failure as nuclear Armageddon was an obsessive possibility; today, it is not. The deterrence logic you use avoids that human nightmare by positing an unending Israeli technological and material advantage, which is plausible for the foreseeable future, but one ultimately does not have to be equal to one’s opponent, just able to destroy all. Indeed, if Israel has say 60 nuclear warheads, deployment of 1/3 or maybe 1/5 would be enough to erase Israeli society of today through returning fallout, given her enemies are next door. So Israel has already entered the irrationally of mutually assured destruction and, to her credit, refused to ready these (less numerous) weapons in her greatest military crisis–1973.

Israeli preemptive strikes have evolved in part through its long war against the PLO, where it sought to hit mobile actors before they struck in return. But people live among people, and such strikes finally ended up as a ground invasion of Lebanon with traditional occupation. From that came Hezbollah, a militia force exterior to the State it inhabits, now morphing into a State within a somewhat fictional State. Preemptive strike morphed into occupation strike which has remorphed into preemptive strike against something now decidedly State like, yet something quite ready to deploy its fighters into the hell of Syria for sectarian allegiance. Israel continues to think it confronts mobile units (an essential ingredient of terror); Hezbollah continues to deploy as if that was what it still is, but is not. When interdicting missiles going to Hezbollah, one is also interdicting missiles that would be outside the control of the Lebanese government.

Deterrence fails if the controlling ideology of Hezbollah remain one of mobility. I think a case can be made that both Hezbollah and Hamas are in process of shifting away from that ideology, but Hezbollah’s incursion into Syria undoubtedly both augments that earlier ideology at home while creating resentment against it; soldiers have families in a way guerrillas do not. I think a stronger case can presently be made that Hamas is further down the road of this shift.

I don’t like Hezbollah being an extra State military territorial actor, nor its involvement in Syria which seems to augment those holding the mobile strike ideology in the organization. Thus I cannot place interdicting military supply into Hezbollah (or Hamas) into the same category as attacking a territorial State actor, largely because Hezbollah is an independent military within Lebanon and still aligns in religious sectional/political conflict, albeit with a heavy territorial outlay (“at our borders”). Striking its military supply buys time to allow shift away from that mobility ideology, but the strikes also gain support for that ideology in its home. The parents of soldiers are not the same as the parents of guerrillas in political potential. There has to be resistance within Hezbollah to the deployment ideology, just as there has to be, and I believe is, resistance to rocket firing into Israel within Gazan Hamas.

So I don’t have a “solution.” I think Syria has set back Hezbollah considerably from what otherwise would be its evolution, and I cannot decry an Israeli policy of limiting military imports into it given the flood of weapons in Syria.

Nonetheless, Israel cannot indefinitely conceive of its opponents as mobile strikers, acting in some variant of all the PLO years of strikes. So while Hezbollah is being infected by Syria, arresting its development, so too is Israel. The weakest link in this infection is the West Bank; there the occupation itself has shifted thought away from strike mobility to living populations. Make progress there, refrain as much as possible from preemptive strikes elsewhere, but not place a total moratorium on such.

That’s all I got.

Reply to Comment

bob wisby

bob wisby

FridayFebruary 28, 2014

Discussion’s over, kids. Time to start in with the cursing and swearing. Where’s Joel when you need him? He’s great at swearing. And we need at least one person to shout “Nazi!” or ‘Racist” or something witty and urbane such as that.

Reply to Comment

Ginger Eis

SaturdayMarch 1, 2014

Wollt ihr den totalen Krieg? They who are now asking themselves the crucial question: how can the leaders of a People be “willing to sacrifice their entire country, their entire society, for the sake of destroying this one”, i.e. Israel , need no Goebbels from the past to answer that question. The modern Goebbels are as good. Powerful stuff. Watch. And weep!

bob wisby

And you don’t differentiate here between soldiers and old ladies or little girls, TT. Or are you suggesting there are 1.1 billion combatants ready to invade your kibbutz?

“Larry, you make it sound like Israel arbitrary bombs Lebanese factories and hospitals..”

No, TT. We reserve that honour for Gaza. It’s easier when you’re shooting fish in a barrel. There’s nothing arbitrary about it at all. It’s deliberate.

Reply to Comment

bob wisby

SaturdayMarch 1, 2014

The Trespasser obviously has some serious ‘pull’ with +972. He’s found it expedient to have his last comment, to which I responded above, removed. Whether this reflects on Larry personally or on +972 as a whole, I don’t know. But what a way to behave.

I really wish journalists would quit using the term “regional superpower” to describe Israel because it is an oxymoron. A superpower by definition has to be able to project power globally and not just in a single region. Israel is a regional power, like Iran.

Reply to Comment

bob wisby

SundayMarch 2, 2014

“A superpower by definition has to be able to project power globally…”

As Israel has always been able to do through its proxy the USA, whose political elite knows very well that unquestioning support for Israel is a prerequisite.

Reply to Comment

Peter Hindrup

SundayMarch 2, 2014

‘The attack was another reminder that even if Israel were to get out of the West Bank and adopt a hands-off policy toward Gaza, it still believes it has the right to bomb neighbouring countries to retard their military development,’

Odd, only Israel and the US has such a belief, and ignore the fact that iti s a war crime under international law.

‘ Muslim countries will sooner or later try to build nuclear weapons. And Israel won’t tolerate that . . .’

If international law was enforced, Israel would have no option but ‘to tolerate that’.

“What do you know – they’re afraid of me. That means I don’t have to attack them – I just have to sit on my military superiority and I’ll be safe. There’s a name for this, isn’t there? Oh yeah – deterrence.”

This only works until somebody calls your bluff. Look at the enemies that Israel has created for itself, look at the map and tell me how Israel imagines that it could survive missiles incoming from 200 ks out to a couple of hundred ks, timed to hit in a few minute window. No nukes required.

Because no matter how strong they get, they will never be able to carry out a crushing, life-threatening attack on Israel, even with nuclear weapons, without ending up in smoking ruins themselves.

This is an Israeli bully boy delusion. If we can get all our missiles out, on target, and if, if, if,

‘Putin is not afraid of Israel’s might, to understate the matter. Why hasn’t he paid us back, and with interest? I would imagine it has something to do with the United States, which Russia is afraid of. But there are limits to Russia’s fear of the U.S., and I’d say that when a U.S. ally bombs Russia’s strategic interests, it is testing those limits.’

‘. . . which Russia is afraid of.’

Any proof of that? As opposed to ‘this is going to be messy, best avoided’?

Then there is the question, is ex Israel, that is no longer existing, worth fighting over? In the world of real power?

Reply to Comment

bob wisby

SundayMarch 2, 2014

International law doesn’t apply to whichever powers presently enjoy global economic and/or military hegemony. That’s not fair, but who said the world was a fair place? Therefore, Israel and the US are basically free to attack whomever they decide needs attacking and there’s nothing anyone can do about that.

Reply to Comment

Vadim

MondayMarch 3, 2014

“This is what we believe: that the Arabs hate us more than they love their children.

There is a term for an attitude such as ours: “dehumanization.””

I think the vast majority of Israeli don’t actually believe this. What we DO believe is that Arab leadership too often sees the the goal of harming Israel as more important than their well-being.

This is clearly evident now in Gaza and in all the RoR nonsense. This was clearly seen throughout the years with our other neighbors.

Regarding the article in general – there is nothing moral or liberal (or even smart) in letting these accursed organizations arm themselves. We’re talking about organizations whose whole strategy is to fire at civilian targets. That’s the only use these rockets are going to have and you are rebuking Israel from attempting to prevent this.

Larry, I think you are wrong in your analysis.

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I was a columnist and feature writer for The Jerusalem Post, as well as the correspondent in Israel for the U.S. News and World Report, for many years. I wrote feature articles for the Sunday Times of London during the second intifada, and have been writing for American Jewish publications since 1990.

Politically, I would describe myself as an ultra-liberal Zionist; as journalist Bradley Burston put it, I’m “probably as far left as a centrist can be.” I was born in New York, grew up in Los Angeles and moved to Israel in 1985.

About +972 Magazine

+972 is an independent, blog-based web magazine. It was launched in August 2010, resulting from a merger of a number of popular English-language blogs dealing with life and politics in Israel and Palestine.

+972 is an independent, blog-based web magazine. It was launched in August 2010, resulting from a merger of a number of popular English-language blogs dealing with life and politics in Israel and Palestine.